


No One Says It Out Loud

by rowofstars



Series: 31 Days of Fandomas 2018 [14]
Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Flirting, Implied Sexual Content, Light Angst, Pre-Season/Series 02, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 16:28:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17206886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rowofstars/pseuds/rowofstars
Summary: Karen's house sitting for the holidays and Frank's back in town.





	No One Says It Out Loud

**Author's Note:**

> This is truly pointless mid-holiday nonsense. Sorry. Set post-Daredevil Season 3 and pre-Punisher Season 2. Let's just assume that at some point before Frank left town, he and Karen banged like a screen door in a hurricane. For the 31 Days of Fandomas prompt #26 - Chimney.

Karen sits back on the sofa, tucking her fuzzy slippered feet under a plaid throw blanket.

The city outside is the kind of bleak grayness that only fits into the liminal days between Christmas and New Year’s when she’s never really sure what she’s supposed to be doing. Freezing rain dots the windows, crystallizing on the grimy piles of snow along the streets, and there’s a weather alert that keeps popping up on her phone about icy roads and windchill.

She watches with amusement as Frank bends low on the living room floor, his denim clad ass sticking out towards her. He has one blackened and grimy hand braced on the tile hearth while the other moves the beam of a flashlight around the inside of the fireplace. She takes a long swallow of her beer, keeping her eyes on his slightly wiggling backside, and licks her lips.

“Wow, Frank, I knew you could fix a leaky pipe, and probably kill a guy with a pipe, but I didn’t know you did fireplaces too.”

Frank looks back over his shoulder with a wry smile. “I do all kinds of things, Page.”

She laughs at his terrible flirting and sets her beer bottle down on the coffee table. “So how was Canada?”

He props the flashlight up on the basket of firewood, then scoots forward on the tile until he’s practically sitting in the fireplace. “Cold,” he replies, reaching one arm up inside the flue, feeling around for the chain to open it. “And big.”

“Wow, I had no idea.” She rolls her eyes. “Come on, you gotta give me more than that. You were gone for five months.”

Frank sighs and sits up, resting his arms on his bent knees. “I was in Saskatchewan for a while. A buddy of mine had a cabin on this lake north of Saskatoon, so I went to check it out.”

“Really?” She rests her chin in hand and gives him a look. “A lake? What did you do the whole time, fish?”

He grinned. “Maybe.”

Karen takes another sip of beer and throws one of the decorative pillows from the sofa at him. He catches it easily and tosses it on the nearby wingback chair.

“I got to pet a dog at a truck stop in Winnipeg,” he adds after a long moment.

“Nice.” She smiles. “Big dog?”

He nods and his grin widens. “A rottie with big paws and a big ol’ head he hadn’t quite grown into. He was barking up a storm to get me to come over.” 

The way he holds up his hands to indicate the head of the dog makes her laugh, and even though he’s not telling her the whole story, she feels like a weight is lifting. Frank Castle is back in New York and helping her fix the flue in the brownstone she’s house sitting for the holidays. There’s something weird and right about that.

“Look, Karen,” he starts, his face turning serious. “I’m sorry I wasn’t around for all that shit with Fisk and Red and that bent as hell FBI guy.”

“No, Frank, don’t -” She frowns and shakes her head at him as he pushes to his feet. 

“I should have been here,” he says, moving to sit on the edge of the coffee table. “I should have - I should have been around to help you.”

She sits forward and puts her hand on his, not caring about the soot staining his skin. “Hey, it’s not your fault.” He shakes his head, looking away from her, and she squeezes his hand. “ _Frank_ , no, no. Don’t you dare.”

“Karen…” He sighs again, finally meeting her eyes. The look she gives him in return makes him drop it, and he blows out a breath. “I can’t believe you ran from the cops.”

She shrugs. “I was easy, I just took a page from the Frank Castle hiding in plain sight playbook.” He gives her a strange look and her lips twitch. “Hoodie, ball cap, hipster beard…”

He laughs at that and knows that even if he’d been here most of it would have still went down the same. Maybe even messier.

“It was hard to pull off that last one,” she adds, her fingers stroking at her chin.

“I’m glad Matt’s alive,” he offers as a change of subject. 

It’s not a lie either, he is genuinely glad Matt Murdock isn’t dead. For all the bullshit between them, Matt’s a good guy, and the fact that he’s taken Wilson Fisk down twice demands a healthy amount of respect, even if he looks ridiculous in his red ninja suit. He’ll have to buy Matt a beer sometime when the cops aren’t looking for one or both of them.

“Yeah.” She smiles and sits back. “Me too.”

He grins crookedly and rubs his dirty hand on his jeans. It’s hard to imagine how all that came about, and sometime he’ll have to drag the whole story out of one of them. “Bet that was pretty fucked up.”

Karen nods and looks down at the black smudges on her palm. They remind her of the stains left after Louis’s bomb went off, and it’s too easy to remember the smell and the ringing in her ears. “Yeah, it was a lot. Good, but a - a lot.”

She stars to sniffle at the memory, and Frank runs his clean hand through his hair. “What a dick.”

She lets out a snorting laugh at that and bites her lip. “Yeah, he can be,” she agrees. “But it’s good now, you know? The three of us, back at the office, helping people.”

Frank goes back to the fireplace, lowering himself to the floor with a soft grunt. “You staying out of trouble?”

A grin slowly spreads over her face as she holds up the beer bottle again, the rim just brushing her lips. She knows what he’s asking. He wants to know that she’s keeping herself safe while still doing everything she can to take down the assholes preying on the less fortunate in the city. He’ll be happy to know she still has that hand cannon, as he called it, in her purse and pepper spray on her key chain.

But she’s not going to bite and admit to anything. “Have we met, Mr. Castle?”

“Once or twice,” is his response as he slides himself as far into the fireplace as he can. 

His gruff voice echoes a bit off the metal chimney and she shivers. It’s started snowing outside, and she knows whatever place he’s crashing at these days can’t be even half as nice as this. Most of them weren’t even half as nice as her old apartment. If she’s staying here for the next four days, she sees no reason Frank can’t stay with her. She’ll file his presence under ‘security’ if anyone asks.

Frank’s hand bangs around in the flue until he finally finds the end of the broken chain. He lets out a curse of victory and puts the end of the flashlight in his mouth so he can see what he’s doing as he attaches the new chain.

“There,” he says, twisting to get his shoulder and his arm out of the small space. “Now, let’s see if we can get it to open.”

He pulls at it a few times, frowning, then bangs on it once, hard, with his fist. “Piece of shit,” he mutters under his breath. 

The slight echo of the flue makes it carry, and Karen shakes her head before she downs the last of her beer. 

“You staying?” she asks, finally. “There’s beer and three guest bedrooms. Could order Thai from that place with the awesome dumplings.”

Frank’s head turns slowly, eyebrows lifting. Dumplings and beer sound fucking great, but he’s not sure about staying here, with Karen. Well, he’s actually very sure about that actually, in that he knows what’s likely to happen, but he’s not sure any of it’s a good idea. The last time they spent the night together, before he left town for almost half a year, he torn buttons off her favorite silk blouse and almost broke her headboard.

“Don’t think about it,” she adds, her voice dropping slightly. “Just say yes.”

“Maybe...” He smiles crookedly, rubbing his chin with his hand. He can feel the grit of the soot against his face. “It’s a little too posh and swanky for me here, Page. I wouldn’t want to bring down the class of the place.”

There’s a black smudge now under his bottom lip and a little on his cheek, and Karen stands up, smoothing her hands over her hips and down to her navy leggings. His eyes follow her movements, and doesn’t bother tugging her t-shirt down over her ass.

“You’re staying,” she says, watching as his smile widens, flashing his teeth. “And you’re having a shower as soon as you shut up and fix my flue, chimney sweep.”

“Yes ma’am,” he replies, wondering if there’s a shower upstairs big enough for both of them.


End file.
